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I woke up one morning finding that the dream, I had struggled to get out of throughout a nightly eternity, was trapped in me. Had fixated my entire body. The feeling, the mood of it and all my senses were still caught in that dream-like state.
I eventually tried to open my eyes but sleep had ensnared my lashes and limited my vision. Scrutinizing through a grid of sticky sleep I found that my physical and mental being had conspired against me and distorted my familiar world.
At that moment, I felt like I understood that beauty and blemish really is in the eyes of the beholder. That what I see is not necessarily what everyone else sees.
This got me thinking about the artist George Condo and his grotesque cartoon-like characters. His colorful figures are somewhere between beast and man and you never really can tell which one of them is going to prevail. And maybe that’s what draws me in. The greater the kink, the greater the urge to explore it.
But even beyond the fascination of oddity there is a reason to look at these pictures. Condo talks about mental painting and his attempt to paint portraits of man’s inner emotions instead of outer appearances. His vivid depictions are not classical portraits of the way people look but the way people think – always bordering between the beautiful and the grotesque, the sober and the ridiculous.
I think what fascinates me about Condo’s work is the way he channels an emotion on to the tarp with a brush stroke so steady it almost seems like the image has been predefined before it even touches the canvas.
The world of Condo’s beastly beings seems endless in its interpretations and at any time, in any mood, I relish their company. Every time I get back to them I discover something new. About the paintings. And about myself? Maybe that is what really gets to me – in some strange way they reflect my own state of mind.
For good or for bad, there is a little piece of everybody’s mind in these paintings. Or dare I say; “maybe there is a little bit of George Condo in all of us?”
